“As long as we can hold things together until they do,” Honor said with another sigh. “We need more manpower, Alistair, and we need it badly.”

“Agreed.” McKeon slid down in his chair to sit on the end of his spine while he slitted his eyes in thought. “Any progress on the data search?” he asked after a moment.

“There is a little progress, actually.” Honor tapped her terminal, where she’d just been reviewing the latest memo from her computer attack team.

“Harkness, Scotty, Anson, Jasper, and Ascher are having the time of their lives playing with the Peeps’ secure data base, and these people were incredibly overconfident. The possibility of someone’s taking the place over from the inside simply never occurred to them. It couldn’t happen. And because it couldn’t, the only people who could purge their files were Tresca or his exec… and they could only do it from the planetary defense command center.” She shook her head. “I guess they figured that since the only real threat had to come from the outside, through the orbital defenses, whoever had the duty there would be in the best position to decide when to purge, so that was where they put their central data processing node, as well. But when Jesus took the command center out from the ground before either of the authorized COs could even get there—” She shrugged and held out her hand, palm uppermost.

“So we really did get their records intact?”

“It looks that way to our team of burrowers, anyway. And the security measures are even less sophisticated and up to date than the ones Harkness had to crack aboard Tepes. There are a lot more of them, so it’s taking some time to work through them, but Anson says it’s more time consuming than difficult.”

“Do we have a time estimate?”

“Only a rough one. Harkness and Ascher agree that they should be able to generate a complete prisoner list within a couple of local days. How accurate and up to date it is will depend on how well the Peeps did their jobs—” her grimace warned her listeners not to get their hopes up on that score “—but we should have at least a starting point to begin looking for reinforcements.”

“Good,” McKeon said with a huge sigh of relief. “And with all due respect to Jesus and his people, Ma’am, I’d certainly like to begin with any Alliance personnel we can dig up.” Honor gave him a sharp glance, and he shrugged. “I trust our people from Inferno completely,” he said, “but we’ve had months for all of us to get to know one another and for them to learn to trust us. And to accept your authority. But now we’re going to have to branch out, and I’d prefer to build up a solid cadre of people who came from our own chain of command before we start trying to weld people from umpteen dozen different militaries into a cohesive force. Especially since you know as well as I do that some of those other people are going to be as hot for vengeance as anyone StateSec dragged back here to Styx to play with.”